A Google image search for "floating stair" illustrates the difference between the meme (the search term) and its expression (the image results). Search completed on 24 January, 2018 via google,com.

Selfish Architecture as Generous Meme

By Jack Murphy

In 1976, Richard
Dawkins, at the back of The Selfish Gene, coined the term
meme, defining it as a “unit of cultural transmission, or a
unit of imitation." He includes “ways of […] building arches” in a list of sample
memes. In 2005, scholar Kate Distin published The Selfish Meme,
which extends the ideas of Dawkins and philosophers Daniel Dennett
and Susan Blackmore into a more contemporary cultural context. In her
own list of memes, Distin includes “ways of building houses,” among
other items which are all “aspects of the cultural world that might
be potentially passed on from one possessor of them to another.”

For architectural
readers these references induce an obvious question: How could the
discipline of architecture directly utilize the meme in a
productive way? The field has been borrowing from biology for
decades, from the ecological—in an understanding of ecosystems and
environments—to the genetic, in terms of more recent explorations
of parametricism and shape grammars. Memes are already virulently
present in architectural communication; whenever, in criticism or
conversation, we say that this looks (or doesn't look) like
that, we are using memes to assess how one thing relates to
another. Memes are more than the currency of imitation because, in
large and overlapping arrangements, they create similarities,
references, and lineages—they allow comparisons to be made. In this
essay, the meme will be considered as the unit of sharing.

Formal memetics
are already studied in great detail in architecture, as form is the
phenotype of the architectural meme. When a building meme—“floating
stair,” for example—is written, an image forms in each
reader’s mind that represents the term, and comparisons are able to
made by comparing the wide variety of expressions to the defining
qualities of the term. Koolhaas’s Elements represents an
exhaustive study of architectural components which could be
understood as a compilation of historic memes.

But as the
examples above indicate, memes are also useful within an
architecture-specific discourse. Not just building themselves, but
ways of building—and ways
of talking about building—are memes. This opens internal
conversations of how architectural culture assembles and relates
knowledge in order to make new memes. An exploration of this
mutational process as a memetic one would emphasize the transmission
and adaptation of ideas over concerns of authorship. It would also
allow for an understanding of how architecture absorbs external
memes, and in return contributes its own memes back to the “soup of
human culture,” the petri dish of its existence.

Also of interest are the architectural
implications of a “cultural trait [that] may have evolved in the
way that it has, simply because it is advantageous to itself.” That a meme would be replicated not because of external fitness but
because of its attractiveness—its image—is a useful idea
for architecture. Selfish architectural memes enable the sharing of
architectural designs and ideas. This essay would explore the
implications of this provocation.

aftabkhatri· Aug 29, 18 1:23 pm

Memes are a great way to deal with essayvikings scam
and I think that it's the only way to know what is right and what is
wrong on it. If they tell use about everything that is setting on it,
then it will be amazing.

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